His breathing had eased a little, but he still hadn’t risked a look outside. The whooping and shouts had faded, and there seemed a chance that the hunters had lost his trail.
Ironically it had been the weight of the food in his backpack that brought lethal trouble to Jeff Thomas. He’d been walking through the deserted streets, with only the high, lonesome sound of circling gulls for company. Finally he’d decided to look up his own apartment on Jackson.
Several streets were blocked with the rubble of burned and fallen buildings, and Jeff constantly had to make detours.
He’d been close to the ruins of the Holiday Inn on Fisherman’s Wharf, pausing to adjust the straps on the heavy pack, when the little boy appeared from some stunted laurel bushes.
He wore cutoff jeans and expensive basketball shoes. A sweater was loose across his shoulders, over a maroon sweatshirt emblazoned with an explicit hologram of a nude couple eating each other. The lad carried a baseball bat, the metal glinting in the pallid sunlight. He stood and stared at Jeff.
“What’s in your pack?”
Jeff felt a pang of doubt.
He looked more carefully at the child, figuring him for around ten years old. His hair was long, the color of Kansas wheat. The eyes were blue, cold, icy blue. There was a short-hafted knife tucked into the Captain Sirocco belt and a silver whistle on a lanyard around his neck.
“Asked what’s in the pack,” he repeated.
“There’s a bit ax to cut the noses off little boys who ask too many questions.”
“It’s food,” the boy stated flatly, totally ignoring the clumsy attempt at humor—and threat.
“You hungry?”
“What sort of a stupid question’s that?”
Jeff could feel the short hairs prickling at the base of his neck.
“If you like, I’ll give you a packet of mint chocolate.”
The boy’s eyes looked at him with a strange, unafraid contempt.
“You got a pack just filled with food. How come we haven’t seen you before, mister? You been in the city long?”
“Coupla days.”
“That’d be it.”
“Want this chocolate?” Now Jeff was beginning to feel the beginnings of anger. “Or you can just push off, kid.”
Before Jeff could move, the boy had taken the whistle and blown a series of high, piercing blasts on it.
Jeff’s broad-bladed knife slithered from its sheath, but the lad was way too quick. Darting back a few paces, mocking the man’s clumsiness, he blew the whistle in another echoing triple shrill.
“Why not run, deadhead?” he said, beckoning to Jeff with ragged-nailed fingers.
In the stillness of the cemetery city, Jeff could hear feet pattering toward him from all directions—all directions except from toward the water.
The backpack making him awkward, Jeff Thomas had run for his life.
Now, in the upper depths of the Ghirardelli block, he stood up and peeked out of the window. There was nobody in sight.
Jeff turned, but the corner of the pack snagged on a shard of jagged glass, snapping it. There was a crash as it spun and landed on the sidewalk, three floors down.
“He’s up there,” screeched a triumphant voice. “Let’s get him.”
He heard them entering the old building, coming after him, and he drew his knife.
Jeff had seen them as they trailed him. He’d realized that in the forefront of a raggedy group of ten- and twelve-year-olds were young, rabid-looking males.
In the dusty gloom, he waited.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Jim Hilton buried his daughter Andrea, alongside his wife, Lori.
Ramon and Carrie had both offered to help, but he’d refused. “My little girl. My job. Last thing I’ll ever do for her.”
It was just after ten o’clock on a dull, overcast Los Angeles morning, with tatters of mist lying out across the city.
The magnolia had once been the pride of the garden, dripping with blossom, shading the bottom corner of the garden near where the land dropped away toward the reservoir.
Now it was a dried stump, the branches brittle as rice paper, the handful of dead leaves carrying the familiar pinkish tint. But as Jim stooped to lay his daughter’s body on the earth, he noticed a few tiny green shoots near the bottom of the shrub.